Destroyer

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Dan Bejar’s latest project with his band Destroyer is an old-fashioned 12-inch single, with the 13-minute art-disco track “Bay Of Pigs” on one side and the spacey, eight-minute “Ravers” on the flip. After all the recent talk about what can be done to revive the album as a distinct, popular artform, here’s what looks to be an effort to retrain focus on one song as a singular event. The single is vinyl-only (though it comes with an MP3 download code), and though “Ravers” feels a little like an afterthought, “Bay Of Pigs” is a real epic—a meditation on life and love in times of crisis. Bejar opens the song with a minute of drone, then a minute of synthesizer twinkle. Then he begins singing quietly over a low throb, free-associating about the end times and happier days. Later, the synthesizer blips rise and a strong beat kicks in, accompanied by background la-las, handclaps, and some warm guitar strumming. “Bay Of Pigs” sounds more like early-’80s post-punk than classic disco—it has some of the texture of Tears For Fears’ The Hurting, or early New Order—but Destroyer has isolated the individual components, letting each take its turn with the song’s simple melodic progression. Using different sounds to create the same tune over and over, Bejar and Destroyer create the feeling of a tale told again and again by different people. It’s a haunting effect, well worth its unusual frame.